Burning Man

by Alan Russell

  I could see—and smell—the puddle of furniture stripper on the table. Miller’s eyes were glassy, but his hand was uncomfortably close to the candle. There was no way I could get to him without his knocking the candle over first.

  “I don’t want to have to use force, Mr. Miller.”

  “If you shoot me,” he said, slurring his words, “you’ll set off the fumes. You shoot me, you shoot yourself.”

  I edged forward as I continued talking. “I’m putting away my gun. See? Why don’t you let me open a window and then we can talk.”

  “No,” he said, running his finger just above the flickering candle. “You and your dog get out.”

  “Is it all right if I sit down? All I want to do is talk to you.”

  I moved toward the table, not waiting for his answer. Even though he was impaired, Miller was still watchful.

  “That’s close enough,” he said. “And keep your dog back.”

  I made a hand gesture to Sirius, and he backed off several steps while I took a seat at the far end of the table.

  Through blurry eyes, Miller regarded me. “Why couldn’t you have waited for just a few more minutes?”

  “What happens then?”

  “You have eyes, don’t you?”

  He motioned with his head to the window behind him. The fire was no longer hiding from me. A long line of flames was now lighting the sky. My heart started pounding and I had to control my voice.

  “We all need to get out of here,” I said. “With the way the wind’s blowing, that fire will be on us any minute now.”

  “I’m here for the show.”

  My eyes went from Miller to what was coming our way. My throat tightened. The fire was still a ways off, but it wasn’t far enough away. The flames were being pushed by gusting winds. The inferno was growing.

  “Fire isn’t something you want to mess with,” I said. “Believe me, I know.”

  “That’s why you and Fido should take off.”

  “That’s why we all should. My dog and I were caught in a fire a few years ago. We got burned up, and it was as bad as anything I ever want to experience. You don’t want that.”

  The window behind Miller was now a vivid orange. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought the sun was rising. I wiped my suddenly wet brow. My body seemed to have forgotten that I don’t sweat as much as normal people.

  Miller took note of the growing fireball behind him. “The flames were hot on my feet when I took off. It took longer to get here than I thought it would.”

  “You started the fire?”

  “I drove my ATV to the end of my property line and then walked into the canyon. I knew once the fire started the winds would drive it over the crest and move it in this direction. I wouldn’t have gone to all that effort if I’d known you were going to show up. I just would have set the damn house on fire.”

  “Maybe I was meant to show up. Maybe you should take it as a sign that you weren’t meant to die.”

  Miller didn’t seem to be listening to what I was saying. “I had to get the fire going good,” he said. “Avocado and citrus are more fire resistant than most trees. But I made sure to put a lot of dry mulch in my groves. It’s making for good tinder.”

  His eyes strayed to the fire, and he nodded, but then his head swung back toward me. Despite the booze and whatever else he might have taken, Miller was still very much aware.

  “You don’t want to die in a fire. I can’t think of a worse way to die.”

  “I can,” he said, “lethal injection.”

  “Once a jury hears how your son was bullied, they’ll be sympathetic to your position. They’ll understand you were in pain.”

  “My son wasn’t just bullied. He was murdered. He couldn’t take the suffering anymore. I only saw him weekends, you know. My wife and I divorced ten years ago. I knew my son was unhappy, but I didn’t know why. I learned too late how they killed him.”

  Orange light now filled the dining room. The fire was announcing itself.

  “What do you mean when you say they killed him?”

  “Dinah opened my eyes. When she first called the crisis line everything she said had this terrible déjà vu quality. So I did a little digging, and I found out about my son and his friend. Someone saw them hugging one another. That really brought out Klein and his jackals. They never gave him any peace after that.”

  “Was his friend Jeremy Levitt?”

  Miller sighed and nodded. “I don’t know if my son was gay, but I do know how special he was, and how sensitive. Those animals played on his sensitivity.”

  “He died of a drug overdose,” I said.

  “That’s what he wanted it to look like. It was an accident, just like this fire was an accident. Like son, like father.”

  An orange light was now reaching out for my body; I was in its light and heat. The fire was descending on the house. There was no time for stories, but I continued to listen.

  “My son didn’t want my ex-wife and me to feel responsible for his death, so he made it look like he was taking drugs and had an overdose.”

  “Jeremy told you this?”

  “Jeremy told me he never saw my son take drugs and never heard him mention using them.”

  “There was a report that your son went to raves, and that he was seen taking drugs.”

  “He went to one rave. That’s where he bought the drugs that he used two weeks later to kill himself. That’s why he made a show of taking them at the rave.”

  “Let’s say you’re right about all of this. In the end, it was Danny that took his own life. Why did you murder Paul Klein?”

  “‘Suicide Is Painless.’”

  “I don’t agree.”

  “I’m talking about the title to a song. You’ve probably heard it a million times but don’t even know it. It’s the opening music to the show M*A*S*H*. I learned that Klein liked to hum that tune when he bullied my son. He’d phone my son and play that tune. He wanted Danny to think about suicide. He pushed him into the abyss.”

  “How do you know all of that?”

  “I asked the right people. It was Dinah that made me ask the questions, because he was doing the same thing to her. Whenever he got the chance, whenever others weren’t around, Klein hummed his dirge around Dinah.”

  There was another scent now in addition to the fumes in the air. Smoke was filling the house.

  “We have to leave.”

  He shook his head. I wanted to flee, but curiosity kept me there a few moments longer, trumping my fear. “Why did you crucify Klein?”

  “Why did he crucify me?”

  The room was heating up rapidly, which could only mean one thing: the house was on fire. Miller was a dead man, and if I didn’t leave, I’d join him. But at that moment Miller decided to satisfy my curiosity.

  “I am not sure when the idea first came to me to crucify him,” he said. “I had already decided to kill him, but that wasn’t punishment enough. I wanted his death to be a spectacle. I wanted to mock him in death as he had mocked my son in life.”

  The window behind Miller began to crack. He turned his head, but out of the corner of his eye saw me move toward him. Miller grabbed the candle. There was no way to reach him without his sending the house up in flames.

  “No,” he said, brandishing the candle.

  It was his last chance, and mine. I couldn’t afford to try and rescue him. “Let’s go!” I yelled to Sirius.

  The two of us raced for the front door. I reached for the handle, and then recoiled. It was hot to the touch. I looked through the window and saw flames enveloping the front porch.

  We sprinted toward the back of the house. As we passed by the dining room the window broke. Shards flew as the fumes and whatever had been poured on the table ignited, and Miller was encased in flames. His screams trailed behind us.

  Suicide wasn’t painless.

  We ran out the back door. Most of the house was already in flames. There was no choice where to run. While we�
�d been talking, flames had swept over the grove. The fire had leapfrogged into outlying areas; the chaparral on the south side of the fence was already torching, and offered no escape. The only area not yet overrun by flames was to the west.

  I kept low, trying to swallow as little smoke as possible, trying to find a way out. The fire seemed to have outflanked us and was attacking on all sides. I cursed myself for having stayed in the house too long, for once again putting our lives on the line. Of all people, I should have known the perils of a wildfire. As we ran I tried to figure out how we were going to survive. Was there an answer? If you believed Bob Dylan, it was blowing in the wind.

  Hard as it was to do, I stopped my mad dash. We couldn’t outrun the fire for long. If we were to survive, I had to outthink it. The way the wind was gusting, there was no safe spot. You had to assume the fire was going to burn everything and everywhere.

  I patted down my pockets. That’s what people do when they’re desperate to find something they know isn’t there; they search anyway because they don’t know what else to do. This time I found what I was looking for and pulled free the matches I’d used to start a fire the night before.

  The wind kicked up around us. It was a warm wind, but I still felt chilled. I knew what I had to do: I needed to fight fire with fire, and I was Scarecrow afraid.

  I needed to create a firebreak. With a big enough dead zone of consumed tinder, we might survive the flames. Firefighters are good at setting back burns, but then they know what they’re doing. They burn an area of vegetation, working to create a fire break that doesn’t add to the main fire. There is an art to back burns. Firefighters set their flames near enough to the primary fire so that it sucks the backfire inward. With no fuel to burn, the fire’s approach is often stopped.

  There was a channel running through the grove that was crisscrossed by other smaller conduits. At one time the land might have been irrigated. I made for an area ahead of the fire and then gathered anything that might be combustible, clearing a ten-foot-by-ten-foot area of all its mulch, dried grass, twigs, and branches. Then I spread my gathered tinder along a line and lit a match. Either the wind, or my shaking hand, extinguished the flame.

  I opened the matchbox again, and several of the matches spilled to the ground. It took me three attempts to successfully strike a match, but the sparking and glow lasted only a moment, and once more the flame died out.

  The fire was coming at me, reaching out with its heat and smoke and roar. I chafed at the irony of not being able to start my own fire. In Catholic grade school, I remembered Sister Bernadette reading the class “The Little Match Girl.” I was nine years old, and I don’t think I’d ever heard such a sad story. When Sister Bernadette finished reading, I did my best to hide my tears from my classmates. I didn’t buy Sister Bernadette’s explanation that by striking her matches the girl had been able to illuminate an unseen God, and she was helped to go to a better place. I just remembered the image of a bareheaded and barefoot girl freezing to death on the last day of the year.

  I struck another match and failed again. Now I was getting angry. I’d already gone through half the matches. I tried again, and this time the grass lit. I blew gently, added some kindling, and the fire caught. It wanted to be fed, so I added more twigs. When the line of tinder started to burn, I pulled down a dead avocado branch and held it out to the fire. It took maybe half a minute for my makeshift torch to catch, and then I started walking around the space and igniting all the material I’d gathered.

  The big fire was drawing close. I threw down my torch and ran to a denuded spot along the channel and began to dig. I wondered if I was digging our grave. We would need a bunker to survive the fire. Sirius took a spot next to me. I didn’t know the command for “dig,” but he worked without being told, and the dirt began to fly. I clawed and he dug in a desperate race against the licking fire. Smoke clawed at our noses and lungs, but we kept digging. And then the fire was too close. There was too much smoke to effectively see if my backfire had worked. If enough vegetation had burned, maybe we’d have haven enough from the nightmare around us.

  I called Sirius to get into the hole we’d dug, and then I piled dirt all around its top, trying to make a barricade to ward off the blaze. The fire kept coming, getting nearer and nearer until I was forced to jump into our foxhole, where I held Sirius close and tried to shield him from the flames.

  CHAPTER 22:

  GRAVE CONFESSIONS

  The locomotive didn’t kill us.

  That’s how I described it to Seth when he visited us in the hospital. I said as the fire passed over, it felt like I was lying between railroad tracks with a locomotive sweeping by overhead, and nothing separating me from death. All I could do was to wait it out. The sound almost drove me from our hole; the voice of fire is a terrible thing. It raged and roared, and all the while the wind blew dirt and debris and embers at us. I held on to Sirius as the flames swept past us and took their toll. I don’t know how long our torment lasted, but the locomotive finally passed us by.

  It left burns all over my back, neck, and arms, but I was alive.

  Later, I was told how lucky we were. My backfire might, or might not, have helped us survive. More than anything else, the location of our foxhole probably saved us. It was down low and far enough away from the trees that we were spared from the fire. William Cummings was right: there are no atheists in foxholes.

  For three days we’d been at the burn unit. Strings had been pulled from above, and Sirius and I were allowed to share the same hospital room. Officially, Sirius was my Seeing Eye dog. My burns were much worse than his, as they should have been. It was my fault for putting both of us in the middle of a fire. Still, we came out of our second fire walk in much better condition than we had our first. Our burns weren’t life threatening, and it looked as if I’d avoid adding any new scarring to the old. But then the old were bad enough and didn’t need the help.

  Gump had stopped by the hospital a few times, so I wasn’t surprised when he appeared unannounced once again.

  “I was thinking of bringing you a plant,” he said, “but they didn’t have any poison ivy.”

  “Don’t worry. Your presence is toxic enough.”

  Gump took a seat next to me and looked around to make sure the coast was clear. “You want a drink? I smuggled in a hip flask.”

  “I better not. Nurse Ratched checks in on me frequently.”

  We talked, and Gump got around to his purpose for being there. I answered more questions about the case, and then I must have drifted off. I’d been doing that for a few days. When I awakened, Gump was gone, but I traded up. Lisbet was there.

  In all her visits to the hospital she had never arrived empty-handed, despite my telling her that she was all I needed. This time the aroma gave away the secret of what she had brought.

  “Pumpkin bread,” I said.

  “It was fresh out of the oven when I picked up a loaf.”

  “It would be a sacrilege if we didn’t eat some now.”

  “I figured you might say that,” Lisbet said and pulled some paper plates and plastic cutlery from her bag. She cut each of us a generous slice, and we munched happily while holding hands. Sirius gave her a plaintive look and got rewarded with his own piece.

  “I also brought us dessert.”

  “Let me guess: penguin chocolates?”

  “Close but no cigar.”

  “I didn’t guess a cigar.”

  “Do you like peanut brittle?”

  “There are those that might argue that sugar, peanuts, and butter are as holy a trinity as barley, hops, and wheat.”

  “Let’s eat to that,” she said, opening up the box and handing me a piece of brittle.

  When we had our fill, I noticed that Lisbet had left a few crumbs on her fingers. I decided to lick them off. She returned the favor. And then the two of us started kissing. We kissed for a long time and would have kissed for even longer except for a strange thump-thump sound that forced us to
investigate.

  Sirius was watching us and wagging his tail.

  “Quit being a voyeur,” I said.

  We had another piece of brittle and then did some more kissing. It really was a great combination. There wasn’t much of a view from my hospital room, but the two of us sat contentedly watching the afternoon shadows give way to evening.

  When all vestiges of the day were gone, Lisbet sighed and said, “I wish I could stay longer, but I took on a new job and that’s going to force me to burn the midnight oil.”

  “As soon as you finish this project, I call dibs on you and the midnight oil, as well as the massage oil.”

  “I look forward to that.”

  “That’s two of us.”

  Something in my voice must have made Sirius decide to start thumping again. I looked at him and said, “I said the two of us, which means that two is company, and three is a crowd. The next time I have the pleasure of this woman’s company, you’re going to be doing your thumping from another room.”

  “Don’t worry, Sirius,” Lisbet said, “his bark is worse than his bite.”

  She patted him but kissed me and then stood up to leave. “You don’t have to walk me out,” Lisbet said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “I do have to walk you out. It’s a good excuse to get out of bed, and besides, when we meet up tomorrow, it won’t be here. I intend on checking myself out in the morning.”

  “I thought your doctor wanted you to stay through the weekend and then evaluate your condition on Monday.”

  “That was before my miraculous recovery.”

  “You haven’t told him you’re checking out, have you?”

  “It might have slipped my mind.”

  “I hope you’re not pushing it.”

  The concern was in her words and her face. It had been a long time since someone had cared for me like that.

  “I’m not. And FYI, the only reason I didn’t check out this morning was that I didn’t want you to freak out.”

  “FYI, I like that.”